Foraging

The mushrooms I actually forage in Wisconsin

JUNE 30, 2026 · BY PAT

Five mushrooms make up basically all of my foraging: oyster, honey, aspen, pheasant back, and reishi. Everything else I walk right past.

The rule I don't break: if I'm not 100% on what something is, I don't eat it. Not 90%, not "pretty sure." There's no mushroom worth a hospital trip, and some of the good ones have a look-alike that will make you sick.

This isn't an ID guide. Get a real field guide, or better, go out a few times with somebody who already knows what they're doing. A blog post is not how you learn which mushrooms are safe.

The way we actually work an ID: in the field we run it through Seek, the free plant and fungus identification app, to get a starting point. For anything we're not certain of, we take a spore print at home — set the cap on paper overnight and check the color the print leaves behind, which is often what separates a good mushroom from its look-alike. If we still don't know, or we're not 100% sure, we don't eat it. And everything we do keep, we cook fully and well done — no raw, no lightly sautéed — which is the last line of defense against getting sick.

I pick in two places mostly: up around my camp near Crivitz, and in the wooded parks around Milwaukee. There's more coming up in a city park than you'd expect once you start looking down.

Oyster

Oysters are the one I'd point a beginner at. They grow in shelves off dead and dying hardwood, they're tough to confuse with anything that'll hurt you, and they keep fruiting into cold weather after everything else has quit.

Aspen Bolete (Leccinum insigne)

Orange cap, dark flecks down the stem, growing under aspens like the name tells you. Once you've seen a few they're easy to spot from a distance — that orange pops against the leaf litter. Cook them all the way through.

Aspen mushroom with an orange cap growing in the forest floor — An aspen mushroom right where it grew.

Honey

Honey mushrooms come up in big clusters around stumps and roots in the fall, so when you find them you usually find a lot. Good eating. But this is the one on this list where the spore print isn't optional: deadly galerina also grows in clusters on wood in the fall, and it's exactly what the name says. Honeys print white; galerina prints rusty brown. Beyond that, honeys upset some people's stomachs even cooked, so cook them hard, and the first time you try them, eat a small amount and see how you do.

Pheasant back

You can smell this one before you're even sure of it — sharp, like a cut watermelon rind. Only worth taking young and tender. Let it get big and it turns to cork you can't chew.

Reishi

Reishi's not an eating mushroom — it's woody, you're not putting it in a pan. I dry it and use it for tea. It's the one on this list I go after for something other than dinner.

What we do with them

A good day ends up looking like this — a couple kinds sorted out on the table.

A day's foraged mushroom haul sorted on a tray and plate

We cook a big batch the same night we bring them in, because fresh is the whole point and they don't keep long.

Skillet full of mixed foraged mushrooms cooking — Dinner the day we picked them.

The rest go in the dehydrator and get dried all the way down. Those go into soups through the winter, right alongside the dried ramps, kale, and spicy peppers from the garden. Pick mushrooms in October, eat mushroom soup in February.

Foraged mushrooms drying on a dehydrator tray — Drying the rest for winter.

Dried jars count toward the pantry like everything else. If you're wondering how big that pantry should be, here's how we figure food storage per person.